Event includes the first public tour of 200-year-old Elmwood Manor

The first public tour of Elmwood Manor allowed 35 people to appreciate the historic home’s architecture and its collections, as part of a tour Saturday.

The History Mystery Tour offered through Continuing Education at Southeast Missouri State University made five stops in and west of Cape Girardeau.

Elmwood Manor in Cape Girardeau was the tour’s capstone, the first public tour of the manor, said Christy Mershon, co-organizer of the tour.

Mershon organized the tour with historian Frank Nickell and Julie Grueneberg, assistant registrar at Southeast, Mershon said.

Elmwood Manor sits west of Cape Girardeau and was constructed in the early 1800s after Alexander Giboney and his wife Rebecca Ramsay received a land grant from the king of Spain in 1797.

People on the History Mystery Tour, offered through Continuing Education at Southeast Missouri State University, tour Elmwood Manor on Saturday in Cape Girardeau.Laura Simon

That original land grant documentation is displayed in the front hall of the home, framed with historic photographs of the mansion and grounds, a sketch of the original cabin and the first house built on the property.

Originally known as El Bosque de los Olmos, or the wood of the elm, the property became known as Elmwood Manor.

Today, 68 acres remain of the original land grant and the 22-room brick mansion, as well as several outbuildings.

Rebecca Ramsay was a Scottish immigrant whose ancestral family home was Dalhousie Castle in Scotland.

Patrick and R.C. Evans, the current owners and residents of Elmwood, are reluctant to allow tours of the property, Grueneberg said. Interior photographs were not allowed during the tour.

From the gate on Bloomfield Road to the front door of Elmwood is one mile, said tour guide Bob Herbst.

The home includes collections of furniture and books believed to have belonged to Louis Houck, and many of the home’s details are original to its construction, Herbst said, including wainscoting constructed from local elm and cypress trees, likely in the early 1800s.

The tour’s first stop was the Armstrong House on Silver Springs Road, where Carl Armstrong and his wife, Connie, live.

As the Armstrongs restored the house, they discovered a log cabin hidden within, which Armstrong’s research determined once belonged to Andrew Ramsay/Ramsey, who in the late 18th century worked to bring English immigrants to what is now Cape Girardeau and owned a large amount of land surrounding the log cabin on what now is Silver Springs Road.

Ramsey’s sister, Rebecca, and her husband, Alexander Giboney, were the original owners of Elmwood Manor.

Armstrong wrote a book on Elmwood Manor and the Ramsey, Giboney and Houck families, all of which have ties to the property.

Armstrong’s book, “Elmwood’s 1,000 Year Dalhousie Legacy,” was published in March and details the history of Elmwood Manor and other historic structures in and near Cape Girardeau, and the families with ties to them.

The second tour stop, Briarwood, is the home Louis Houck built for his daughter, Irma, as a wedding present when she married Charles Guild Juden Jr. in 1901.

Houck, for whom Houck Stadium at Southeast Missouri State University is named, brought railroad lines to Cape Girardeau and had various other business interests. He also was a preeminent Missouri historian, writing the three-volume “History of Missouri” and the two-volume “The Spanish Regime in Missouri,” among others.

Briarwood also is west of Cape Girardeau, off Bloomfield Road.

The tour stopped at Mount Tabor Park and School, which includes a one-room log cabin, one-room log schoolhouse and a two-story log cabin.

The park is at the intersection of Benton Hill Road and Bloomfield Road in Cape Girardeau and is not open to the public.

The tour’s fourth stop was for lunch.

Cape Girardeau is undergoing something of a preservation renaissance, Mershon said. Groups such as the Kellerman Foundation are doing good work, she said.

“I do think there’s a resurgence of interest” in the preservation community, Mershon said, with many interested parties being young retirees.

“We had a waiting list longer than the number of people we brought [today],” Mershon said.

mniederkorn@semissourian.com

(573) 388-3630